This collection of essays examines the institutional framework in which monetary policy is made. The essays consider two questions: How free is the Fed to set monetary policy and to what extent do organizational problems affect the choice of that monetary policy? Topics covered include the Fed's response to movements on its goals, Congressional and presidential pressures on the Fed, the existence of political business cycles operating through monetary policy, and the extent to which monetary policy may be explained by the Fed's own interests. A final section examines the claim that the...

Thomas Starkey (c. 1495 1538) was the most Italianate Englishman of his generation. This book places Starkey into new and more appropriate contexts, both biographical and intellectual, taking him out of others in which he does not belong, from displaced Roundhead to follower of Marsilio of Padua. Beginning with his native Cheshire, it traces his career through Oxford, Padua, Paris, Avignon, Padua again, and finally England, where he spent the last four years of his life trying to fulfil his ambition to serve the commonweal. Most of Starkey's career revolved around his patron Reginald Pole,...

This volume argues that methodologists should pay more attention to the day-to-day problems that practising economists face.